Authors: Pearl S. Buck
With this dry wind the wheat seed that lay in the ground could not sprout and Wang Lung waited anxiously for the rains. And then the rains came suddenly out of a still grey day when the wind fell and the air was quiet and warm, and they all sat in the house filled with well-being, watching the rain fall full and straight and sink into the fields about the dooryard and drip from the thatched ends of the roof above the door. The child was amazed and stretched out his hands to catch the silver lines of the rain as it fell, and he laughed and they laughed with him and the old man squatted on the floor beside the child and said,
“There is not another child like this in a dozen villages. Those brats of my brother notice nothing before they walk.” And in the fields the wheat seed sprouted and pushed spears of delicate green above the wet brown earth.
At a time like this there was visiting, because each farmer felt that for once Heaven was doing the work in the fields and their crops were being watered without their backs being broken for it, carrying buckets to and fro, slung upon a pole across their shoulders; and in the morning they gathered at this house and that, drinking tea here and there, going from house to house barefoot across the narrow path between the fields under great oiled paper umbrellas. The women stayed at home and made shoes and mended clothes, if they were thrifty, and thought of preparations for the feast of the New Year.
But Wang Lung and his wife were not frequent at visiting. There was no house in the village of small scattered houses, of which theirs was one of a half dozen, which was so filled with warmth and plenty as their own, and Wang Lung felt that if he became too intimate with the others there would be borrowing. New Year was coming and who had all the money he wanted for the new clothes and the feasting? He stayed in his house and while the woman mended and sewed he took his rakes of split bamboo and examined them, and where the string was broken he wove in new string made of hemp he grew himself, and where a prong was broken out he drove in cleverly a new bit of bamboo.
And what he did for the farm implements, his wife, O-lan, did for the house implements. If an earthen jar leaked she did not, as other women did, cast it aside and talk of a new one. Instead she mixed earth and clay and welded the crack and heated it slowly and it was as good as new.
They sat in their house, therefore, and they rejoiced in each other’s approval, although their speech was never anything more than scattered words such as these:
“Did you save the seed from the large squash for the new planting?” Or, “We will sell the wheat straw and burn the bean stalks in the kitchen.” Or perhaps rarely Wang Lung would say, “This is a good dish of noodles,” and O-lan would answer in deprecation, “It is good flour we have this year from the fields.”
From the produce, Wang Lung in this good year had a handful of silver dollars over and above what they needed and these he was fearful of keeping in his belt or of telling any except the woman what he had. They plotted where to keep the silver and at last the woman cleverly dug a small hole in the inner wall of their room behind the bed and into this Wang Lung thrust the silver and with a clod of earth she covered the hole, and it was as though there was nothing there. But to both Wang and O-lan it gave a sense of secret richness and reserve. Wang Lung was conscious that he had money more than he need spend, and when he walked among his fellows he walked at ease with himself and with all.
T
HE NEW YEAR APPROACHED
and in every house in the village there were preparations. Wang Lung went into the town to the candlemaker’s shop and he bought squares of red paper on which were brushed in gilt ink the letter for happiness and some with the letter for riches, and these squares he pasted upon his farm utensils to bring him luck in the New Year. Upon his plow and upon the ox’s yoke and upon the two buckets in which he carried his fertilizer and his water, upon each of these he pasted a square. And then upon the doors of his house he pasted long strips of red paper brushed with mottoes of good luck, and over his doorway he pasted a fringe of red paper cunningly cut into a flower pattern and very finely cut. And he bought red paper to make new dresses for the gods, and this the old man did cleverly enough for his old shaking hands, and Wang Lung took them and put them upon the two small gods in the temple to the earth and he burned a little incense before them for the sake of the New Year. And for his house he bought also two red candles to burn on the eve of the year upon the table under the picture of a god, which was pasted on the wall of the middle room above where the table stood.
And Wang Lung went again into the town and he bought pork fat and white sugar and the woman rendered the fat smooth and white and she took rice flour, which they had ground from their own rice between their millstones to which they could yoke the ox when they needed to do so, and she took the fat and the sugar and she mixed and kneaded rich New Year’s cakes, called moon cakes, such as were eaten in the House of Hwang.
When the cakes were laid out upon the table in strips, ready for heating, Wang Lung felt his heart fit to burst with pride. There was no other woman in the village able to do what his had done, to make cakes such as only the rich ate at the feast. In some of the cakes she had put strips of little red haws and spots of dried green plums, making flowers and patterns.
“It is a pity to eat these,” said Wang Lung.
The old man was hovering about the table, pleased as a child might be pleased with the bright colors. He said,
“Call my brother, your uncle, and his children—let them see!”
But prosperity had made Wang Lung cautious. One could not ask hungry people only to see cakes.
“It is ill luck to look at cakes before the New Year,” he replied hastily. And the woman, her hands all dusty with the fine rice flour and sticky with the fat, said,
“Those are not for us to eat, beyond one or two of the plain ones for guests to taste. We are not rich enough to eat white sugar and lard. I am preparing them for the Old Mistress at the great house. I shall take the child on the second day of the New Year and carry the cakes for a gift.”
Then the cakes were more important than ever, and Wang Lung was pleased that to the great hall where he had stood with so much timidity and in such poverty his wife should now go as visitor, carrying his son, dressed in red, and cakes made as these were, with the best flour and sugar and lard.
All else at that New Year sank into insignificance beside this visit. His new coat of black cotton cloth which O-lan had made, when he had put it on, only made him say to himself,
“I shall wear it when I take them to the gate of the great house.”
He even bore carelessly the first day of the New Year when his uncle and his neighbors came crowding into the house to wish his father and himself well, all boisterous with food and drink. He had himself seen to it that the colored cakes were put away into the basket lest he might have to offer them to common men, although he found it very hard when the plain white ones were praised for their flavor of fat and sugar not to cry out,
“You should see the colored ones!”
But he did not, for more than anything he wished to enter the great house with pride.
Then on the second day of the New Year, when it is the day for women to visit each other, the men having eaten and drunk well the day before, they rose at dawn and the woman dressed the child in his red coat and in the tiger-faced shoes she had made, and she put on his head, freshly shaven by Wang Lung himself on the last day of the old year, the crownless red hat with the small gilt Buddha sewed on front, and she set him upon the bed. Then Wang Lung dressed himself quickly while his wife combed out afresh her long black hair and knotted it with the brass pin washed with silver which he had bought for her, and she put on her new coat of black that was made from the same piece as his own new robe, twenty-four feet of good cloth for the two, and two feet of cloth thrown in for good measure, as the custom is at cloth shops. Then he carrying the child and she the cakes in the basket, they set out on the path across the fields, now barren with winter.
Then Wang Lung had his reward at the great gate of the House of Hwang, for when the gateman came to the woman’s call he opened his eyes at all he saw and he twirled the three long hairs on his mole and cried out,
“Ah, Wang the farmer, three this time instead of one!” And then seeing the new clothes they all wore and the child who was a son, he said further, “One has no need to wish you more fortune this year than you have had in the last.”
Wang Lung answered negligently as one speaks to a man who is scarcely an equal, “Good harvests—good harvests—” and he stepped with assurance inside the gate.
The gateman was impressed with all he saw and he said to Wang Lung,
“Do you sit within my wretched room while I announce your woman and son within.”
And Wang Lung stood watching them go across the court, his wife and his son, bearing gifts to the head of a great house. It was all to his honor, and when he could no longer see them when they had dwindled down the long vista of the courts one inside the other, and had turned at last wholly out of sight, he went into the gateman’s house and there he accepted as a matter of course from the gateman’s pock-marked wife the honorable seat to the left of the table in the middle room, and he accepted with only a slight nod the bowl of tea which she presented to him and he set it before him and did not drink of it, as though it were not good enough in quality of tea leaves for him.
It seemed a long time before the gateman returned, bringing back again the woman and child. Wang Lung looked closely at the woman’s face for an instant trying to see if all were well, for he had learned now from that impassive square countenance to detect small changes at first invisible to him. She wore a look of heavy content, however, and at once he became impatient to hear her tell of what had happened in those courts of the ladies into which he could not go, now that he had no business there.
With short bows, therefore, to the gateman and to his pockmarked wife he hurried O-lan away and he took into his own arms the child who was asleep and lying all crumpled in his new coat.
“Well?” he called back to her over his shoulder as she followed him. For once he was impatient with her slowness. She drew a little nearer to him and said in a whisper,
“I believe, if one should ask me, that they are feeling a pinch this year in that house.”
She spoke in a shocked tone as one might speak of gods being hungry.
“What do you mean?” said Wang Lung, urging her.
But she would not be hastened. Words were to her things to be caught one by one and released with difficulty.
“The Ancient Mistress wore the same coat this year as last. I have never seen this happen before. And the slaves had no new coats.” And then after a pause she said, “I saw not one slave with a new coat like mine.” And then after a while she said again, “As for our son, there was not even a child among the concubines of the Old Master himself to compare to him in beauty and in dress.”
A slow smile spread over her face and Wang Lung laughed aloud and he held the child tenderly against him. How well he had done—how well he had done! And then as he exulted he was smitten with fear. What foolish thing was he doing, walking like this under an open sky, with a beautiful man child for any evil spirit passing by chance through the air to see! He opened his coat hastily and thrust the child’s head into his bosom and he said in a loud voice,
“What a pity our child is a female whom no one could want and covered with smallpox as well! Let us pray it may die.”
“Yes—yes—” said his wife as quickly as she could, understanding dimly what a thing they had done.
And being comforted with these precautions they had now taken, Wang Lung once more urged his wife.
“Did you find out why they are poorer?”
“I had but a moment for private talk with the cook under whom I worked before,” she replied, “but she said, ‘This house cannot stand forever with all the young lords, five of them, spending money like waste water in foreign parts and sending home woman after woman as they weary of them, and the Old Lord living at home adding a concubine or two each year, and the Old Mistress eating enough opium every day to fill two shoes with gold.’”
“Do they indeed!” murmured Wang Lung, spellbound.
“Then the third daughter is to be married in the spring,” continued O-lan, “and her dowry is a prince’s ransom and enough to buy an official seat in a big city. Her clothes she will have of nothing but the finest satins with special patterns woven in Soochow and Hangchow and she will have a tailor sent from Shanghai with his retinue of under tailors lest she find her clothes less fashionable than those of the women in foreign parts.”
“Whom will she marry, then, with all this expense?” said Wang Lung, struck with admiration and horror at such pouring out of wealth.
“She is to marry the second son of a Shanghai magistrate,” said the woman, and then after a long pause she added, “They must be getting poorer for the Old Mistress herself told me they wished to sell land—some of the land to the south of the house, just outside the city wall, where they have always planted rice each year because it is good land and easily flooded from the moat around the wall.”
“Sell their land!” repeated Wang Lung, convinced. “Then indeed are they growing poor. Land is one’s flesh and blood.”
He pondered for a while and suddenly a thought came to him and he smote the side of his head with his palm.
“What have I not thought of!” he cried, turning to the woman. “We will buy the land!”
They stared at each other, he in delight, she in stupefaction.
“But the land—the land—” she stammered.
“I will buy it!” he cried in a lordly voice. “I will buy it from the great House of Hwang!”
“It is too far away,” she said in consternation. “We would have to walk half the morning to reach it.”
“I will buy it,” he repeated peevishly as he might repeat a demand to his mother who crossed him.